> They'd still be there

Unfortunately.

Not sure the concentration of Zuckerbergs and the concentration of hackers is particularly related, except maybe the latter attracts the former.

Zuckerberg's no genius, he was in the right place at the right time near the right people. He's competent, but no more than most of the people here. His morals (or the flexibility thereof) were what made him rich.

I really wish I was so brimming with self-confidence as to say that I'm just as competent as the guy who founded the eighth or so most valuable company on Earth, and he was just in the right place at the right time.

Zuckerberg is clearly a not-great guy in some ways, but the reason we're all posting on Hacker News during the workday and he's running a centibillion dollar company is because he's an immensely intelligent and talented and focused man and we are... well, the kind of people who post on internet forums during the workday.

I with I was as starry-eyed as to think he did it because of his "hacker skills"...

>the reason we're all posting on Hacker News during the workday and he's running a centibillion dollar company is because he's an immensely intelligent and talented and focused man and we are... well, the kind of people who post on internet forums during the workday.

There are people who post regularly in HN (even in the top-50 contributors) who as hackers and programmers (and work ethic) run not just circles, but the 10-dimensional equivalent of a circle, around Zuckenberg, and have no "multi-billion dollar" companies...

so in the original context of my post... Zuckerberg : Harvard :: hacker : software industry. it's an analogy. I wasn't saying he's a great hacker.

But also the dude obviously is a great hacker. There are vanishingly few people who can bootstrap the infrastructure that will let a company grow to Facebook scale -- you need exceptional depth and breadth of computer knowledge, as well as great focus and an ability to prioritize and satisfice.

>There are vanishingly few people who can bootstrap the infrastructure that will let a company grow to Facebook scale

Well, he didn't do that. He just wrote a crappy basic PHP backend. The "scaling at Facebook scale" part happened later, after people were hired and VC money flew in.

Same like early Twitter was a crap Rails app that they even had to restart a few times a day because of memory leaks. It still got them through to attract users (even though it crashed all the time) and money, so they eventually were able to fix that and grow to Twitter scale.

None of those things happened because of very talented hacker founders. Those kind of apps aren't even very technical or different to the average CRUD app - not until the scale/infrastructure people come in much later: those do the actual hard work.

Cloudflare, Redis, SQLlite, Nginx, ElasticSearch etc, on the other hand, are a different story. Those are absolutely apps/platforms made from scratch by seriously talented hackers, even if others were involved to improve them later on.

> He just wrote a crappy basic PHP backend.

lol. citation needed.

Among geniuses who can build a FAANG company from scratch, I'm sure Zuck is not the strongest software engineer or hacker or whatever. Like, Jeff Dean is undoubtedly a better engineer. Craig Silverstein, too. And Bret Taylor. But if you're going to tell me Zuck is a mediocrity -- not just "a lesser light than Jeff Dean" but an actual mediocrity like us rank-and-file HN-posting losers -- then I'm gonna want to see some evidence.

I would say the fact that he had the drive to quickly learn Chinese and then went to China and actually gave a talk in Chinese suggests he has higher than average mental aptitude.

He studied Chinese daily for four years prior to giving that talk.

Studying a language daily for four years suggests determination and willpower, yes.

But I would expect most people who have studied a language daily for four years to be able to give a talk in that language if they needed to and knew ahead of time. I'm not sure that's a non-average learning time.

> citation

Citations widely available via the obvious web searches. Here are responses on Quora with some details about how the hackers hired by Facebook worked around PHP's limitations.

https://www.quora.com/Does-Facebook-still-use-PHP?share=1

If Mark was a hacker of some kind, he was a growth hacker. That's what Facebook was (in)famous for in its early days - implementing various little psychological tricks that drove adoption. A lot of that came from Mark (initially, pretty much all of it).

I'm not aware of any evidence that he was an exceptional engineer. So what? Why would he even care about being that? As long as you can hire engineers that are better than you, you don't need to be a great one to grow a social network. We're not talking about AI here.

iirc, Zuckerberg did not think up the concept for the like button - which was one of the huge drivers for engagement on the site.

Having said that, I think Zuckerberg was a hacker. He made a few small web apps and one took off. His success shouldn't mean he is not a hacker.

I don't think the definition of a hacker is "made a few small web apps" or "one of his apps took off".

That would make him an entrepreneur and a web programmer.

Not a hacker, which (in this context) is about a great relationship with programming than "making a few web apps".

Six hectobillion dollar company

It's this exact kind of false, retrospective meritocratic judgment that makes gods of mere men. Don't do that, please, it poisons the discourse by distorting reality.

>competent as the guy who founded the eighth or so most valuable company on Earth

That usually has more to do with machiavellianism than competence

Of course some would consider machiavellianism a kind of talent.

There are millions of people just as smart and smarter as Zuckerberg. He had access to computers when they were expensive and had an affluent life that sent him to Harvard where he was around people who could do stuff like fund new businesses.

Meta is a 10 million dollar company?

Zuckerbergs?! What the hell?

I was using that as a shorthand for "geniuses who found multi-billion dollar companies".

I think I agree with goodpoint and I also think that my own usage of "Zuckerberg" is the exact opposite of yours.

Musk, Gates, Zuckerberg and Jobs are notoriously not hackers nor even software developers and even less so geniuses. They are businessmen.

Growth "hacker", I guess

Ew

> the density of Zuckerbergs would be a lot lower. They'd still be there, but harder to find.

Interestingly, he enrolled in CS at a time it was believed to be a dead career, with offshoring replacing expensive American engineers.

> Interestingly, he enrolled in CS at a time it was believed to be a dead career

Believed by whom? Because AFAIR this was never either the general public sentiment or consistent with BLS projections across the fields that CS feeds into.

> this was never either the general public sentiment

Post dotcom crash in the early 00's? Everyone was saying this was a dead market. Cost-cutting was everywhere.

Not sure of what the downvote is about because this is an accurate representation of the post-dotcom time. Enrollments in CS went down, programmers would be offshored to India, nobody wanted to be in tech anymore, unemployment was high. Hard to belive now but people enrolling in CS at this time were mocked and ridiculed.

Yep. I decided upon my major in a similar time period. People thought I was stupid, and my advisor advised me against it. There was a lot of doom and gloom on the internet - way more than any downturn since then. Way more than what you see about ChatGPT replacing programmers.

The options I was weighing were philosophy, math, or CS. I chose CS because I liked building things. I figured I could at least make minimum wage. If it turned out so terrible I could just go back to school for something else.

Much to my relief, my first job out of college paid me $50k.

Yup. I went off to college right after this and was from a poorer family and that's one reason I opted not to go into CS as a degree despite over a decade of programming/web experience. It wasn't seen as a stable career path and the tech sector had a reputation as a bubble hype machine.

The hilarity is that I went into Linguistics instead, and it turns out that in 2023 that is actually very helpful... I'm not the only one either.

I was being told that in 2005/2006. Lucky for me I didn't care.. I just wanted to study something to do with computers rather than biology or physics.

IIRC this was far from a uniform opinion, because CS feeds careers in so many areas in and out of tech.

I do remember it being a big concern on the part of 9-to-5 coders at large corporations.